Independents and Structural Political Reform

Since 1965 I have registered to vote as an independent. When I moved back to NY in 2000 I registered as an Independence Party member with the thought that I would get evolved in the political process in the future. The following year I was asked to sign an Independence Party petition and this started my political career.

Besides the state and city work there was "CUIP", the Committee for a Unified Independent Party. Over time it morphed into IndependentVoting.org.

We are a national strategy, communications, and organizing center working to connect and empower Americans who identify themselves as independents. Our mission is to develop a movement of independent voters for progressive post-partisan reform of the American political process.

We do not aspire to be another special interest. Independents seek instead to diminish the regressive influence of parties and partisanship by opening up the democratic process. Independents in the CUIP networks are creating new electoral coalitions such as the Black and Independent Alliance, supporting new models of nonpartisan governance and striving for the broadest forms of “bottom-up” participation.

With the size of the independent voting bloc growing, the barriers that limit independent participation have become even more glaring.

I am in my 4th term as a member of the State Committee, County Committee, and New York City Executive Committee representing the Eastside of Manhattan. I also created many of the websites representing Independents nationwide.

Here is a video that represents who we are and where we are going as Independents. That's me in the middle right, on the steps of City Hall.


Open primaries allow for greater political participation, challenging partisan control over the electoral process.

Use the above link to find out more about this independent movement.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NY Senate Passes Bill Setting Up the Initiative Process

This post is from Ballot Access News.

On June 7, the New York State Senate passed S709, which proposes a change to the New York State Constitution. It would create the initiative process in New York, for statewide laws, and also for local government. The vote was 47-15. All of the “no” votes were Democrats. Now the bill goes to the Assembly. If it passes there, because it is a proposed constitutional change, it must pass both houses of the legislature again in 2013. Then the voters would decide in November 2014 whether to pass the idea.

Ballot Access News says: "It will be interesting to see if Independent Voting, formerly known as the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, and before that the New Alliance Party, will support S709. That group is very well organized in New York City. Virtually all the “no” votes in the Senate were New York City Senators. The bill would require a statewide initiative to obtain a number of signatures equal to 5% of the last vote for Governor. Currently that number is 232,709."

A reader of Ballot Access News comment: "Unfortunately, this is not being proposed to actually provide for initiative in New York. It is the Republicans alternative to having to vote on same-sex marriage equality. They’ve been avoiding making commitments by saying that the voters should make the decision. So instead of implementing equality now, which is what the polls say NYers want, the Senate Republicans would make us wait 4 more years."

I wrote about I&R before. I do not think we want the version in CA. I want I&R but think we would need some type of independent board review to make sure the actual written law works.









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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SC Rep. Joe Neal - Independent Spirit Award

South Carolina Rep. Joe Neal Receives Independent Spirit Award from NYC Independence Party

On June 6, 2011, I attended the New York County Chairman's Reception. This event was special for me as I took part in one of the call banks to let the voters of South Carolina know that the republicans were trying to close their primary. We were able to stop their effort in the courts.

Use the above link to The Hankster's blog to view this presentation.

Constitutional attorney Harry Kresky introduces Dr. Lenora Fulani who introduces South Carolina Representative Joseph Neal, "a black leader who stood up and said open primaries are fundamental to the political rights of black folks". Rep. Neal was honored with the Independent Spirit Award at the NYC Independence Party Manhattan Spring Chairman's Reception hosted by Cathy Stewart at Tribeca Grill.

Even if I think we need a new voting selection process, sometimes the good guys/gals win!!









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYC Independence Party 11th Anti-Corruption Awards

Thanks to the Hankster for this post.

California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado received a 2010 Anti-Corruption Award from NYC Independence Party Sunday afternoon at the Tribeca Grill. Maldonado, introduced at the event by independentvoting.org president Jackie Salit, was responsible for putting top two open primary initiative Proposition 14 on the ballot this year in California. Prop 14 was passed with 53.73% of the vote and allows 3.4 million independent and decline-to-state voters in the state to vote in primaries. Lt. Gov. Maldonado will be speaking at the No Labels launch in NYC.




I attended this event and fund raiser. I received my award during the 9th event. Our group, IndependentVoice.org in CA., helped to make Prop. 14 a successful initiative. Use the above link to find out more about IndependentVoice.

NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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The ELEVENTH ANNUAL ANTI-CORRUPTION AWARDS

If you are in NY, please join us for this event. I was honored to receive a award during the 9th event.

Use the above link to find out how to attend.

NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYS General Election Ballot

Thanks to Ballot Access News for this post.

The New York State Board of Elections met and determined whether various petitions for independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, should be determined valid. In New York, the Board disqualifies such petitions even if no one challenges, if the petitions on their face lack any possibility of containing enough valid signatures.

These parties will be on the ballot for statewide office: the five qualified parties (Democratic, Republican, Independence, Conservative, Working Families), followed by these parties: Anti-Prohibition, Freedom, Green, Libertarian, Rent is 2 Damn High, Tea, and Taxpayers. Although the Taxpayers Party is on the ballot now, a lawsuit is pending on whether that petition is valid. The Taxpayers nominee for Governor is Carl Paladino, who is also the Republican nominee.

The Tea Party gubernatorial nominee is Steven Cohn, an attorney from Long Island. His petition had been challenged by allies of Carl Paladino, but the Tea Party petition survived. Cohn is supported by Bobby Kumar, who has been active in the Independence Party and who briefly held himself out last year as national chair of the Reform Party.

The Freedom Party gubernatorial nominee is Charles Barron, who is angry with the Democratic Party because all six of the Democratic Party’s statewide nominees this year are non-Hispanic whites.

We had our New York County Independence Party reorganization meeting yesterday and I was reelected to the Executive Committee. I also was elected for my 4th term as the representative from the 73 A.D. (Eastside of Manhattan) on the NY State Committee of the Independence Party. I was uncontested in the Primary.

NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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Pre NYC Charter Revision Commision Meeting

Thanks to The Hankster for the videos.

Yesterday Mayor Bloomberg had decided not to ask the commission to put nonpartisan elections or Top Two on the 2010 ballot. The meeting vote on what will be on the ballot is tonight and I will attend and report what was decided.

Here is Bloomberg at our fundraiser this year.


We started to hear about it early with comments like:

"Mayor Michael Bloomberg is backing away from his fight to eliminate political primaries. NY1 has learned the mayor will not call on the City Charter Revision Commission to put the issue before voters this fall. One source says a huge blow to the mayor's efforts came over the weekend when the Reverend Al Sharpton spoke out in defense of political primaries."

"The mayor's operatives had hoped to convince a majority of the 15-member Charter Revision Commission to back the idea at its Wednesday meeting, after weeks of quietly leaning on members for their support. But the lack of enthusiasm from newspaper editorial boards, and Rev. Al Sharpton's weekend decision to oppose it, led Bloomberg to decide today not to pursue the idea again, sources said. While Bloomberg appointed the commission's members, he did not press them to support his idea, and Chairman Matthew Goldstein said he did not want the commission to put any questions on the ballot unless voters were likely to approve them."

Community leaders, including Dr. Lenora Fulani, held a press conference on the steps of City Hall Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 10:00 am, to respond to statements by Democratic Party elected officials and Rev. Al Sharpton that partisan elections better serve the interests of minority voters, a shift by Sharpton who had previously stated that nonpartisan elections deserved serious consideration. A majority of New York City's 751,442 unaffiliated voters, who would be enfranchised under a nonpartisan system, are people of color—20% are African American, 24%Latino, and 11% Asian.


NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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NYC Charter Revision Commission 8/2/2010

Thanks to The Hankster for the videos.

It seems Top Two, Non Partisan Municipal Elections (NPME) is back on the table!

I was unable to attend but watched the Internet streamed meeting.

This meeting took place in Staten Island. Sarah Lyons, the Chair of the Staten Island County Committee of the Independence Party testified, as did Dick Dadey of Citizens Union.




Dick Dadey, Executive Director of Citizens Union.


Sarah Lyons, Chair of Staten Island Independence Party.

I have submitted my thoughts about how the Top Two process could work using their website. We will know what will get on the November 2010 ballot at their 8/11/2010 meeting in Manhattan. It will be an open meeting but will not have public discussions.

In 1934, the NY state legislature created a NYC Charter Revision Commission who put a new voting system of Proportional Representation on the ballot, that won. Under this system, all candidates would appear together on the ballot and voters would cast ballots for multiple candidates ranked by order or preference. Any candidate getting 75,000 first choice votes would be elected. If no candidate met this threshold, the last candidate was dropped and those voters next candidate was part of a recalculation until the 75,000 was reached. Today this would be called an open election with Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This concept passed with 60% of the vote in 1936 with Citizens Union leading the campaign.

In the 1937 City Council election: 13 Democrats, 2 independent Democrats, 3 Republicans, 5 American Labor party, 3 independents from the City Fusion party won, the most diverse City Council in decades.

Immediately after this election, Democrats and Republicans began an attempt to repeal this voting method. These efforts failed in 1938 in a state constitutional convention and in 1940 in a citywide referendum. But in 1943, 2 Communists were elected and re-elected in 1945.

This allowed the 2 major parties to attack proportional representation as Un-American and a threat to national security.

In 1947, at the dawn of a new Red scare, voters approved the repeal. In 1949, the Democrats regained control of the city council.

Let your voice be heard, "NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!" and NY needs nonpartisan elections, not party primaries, that is real democracy.

Use the above link to view the entire meeting.

To find out more about NYC politics and reform, read Francis S. Barry's "The Scandal of REFORM".

Michael H. Drucker
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Non Partisan Elections in NYC

Now that Prop 14. Open Primaries has past in CA., it is time for Non Partisan Elections to get on the 2010 Ballot in NYC. The Charter Revision Commission must make their decision by Sept. 2 to have time to add it to the ballot for Absentee & Military ballots.

We brought our signs, ideas, and expert witness to the Commission's public meeting June 2 for VOTER PARTICIPATION. Independents have been petitioning students and New Yorkers, in public places, engaging in a dialogue about the disenfranchisement of more than 800,000 New York voters that are kept out of the first and most crucial phase of voting. Independents have obtained signatures of registered independents, but also of registered Democrats and Republicans, in support of placing non-partisan elections on the ballot. This hard work has culminated in over 1,000 signatures by young voters in a letter to the Charter Revision Commission. Another 1,000+ signatures, different from the ones provided to the Commission, were included in a letter to Mayor Bloomberg. The fruits of this labor were manifested by the young people in attendance at the voter participation forum at Lehman College. The engagement of youth in attendance was evident in their testimony.
Now it is time for all New Yorkers' to get involved. Here is a sample of our new petition form to collect more signatures for the Commission.



If you are a concerned New Yorker, call 212-962-1699 to ask to sign or collect more signatures.

Michael H. Drucker
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"Why I'm an Independent": Bryan Puertas, NYC Independence Party

Bryan Puertas is an activist with IndependentVoting.org and an executive committee member of the Queens Independence Party of New York. He currently heads up the citywide college campus drive for nonpartisan elections in NYC, which has collected over 2000 signatures from young people in favor of nonpartisan municipal elections in NYC. He and too other youth activists are delivering the letters to Mayor Bloomberg at City Hall asking the mayor to help with getting the NYC Charter Revision Commission to put Nonpartisan Municipal Elections on the November 2010 as a ballot amendment.

"Greetings. My name is Bryan Puertas. I’m an activist and organizer with the New York City Independence Party. It’s important that independents tell their own stories. Certainly there are already plenty of stories being told about us. You may have heard some of them. Undecideds. Spoilers. Soft Democrats. Soft Republicans. Flip floppers. None of them get it right. Yet if we don’t speak up and tell our own stories, we hear theirs so often that we may even start to believe them. I respectfully submit some new labels. The New Majority. The Deciding Voters. The Nonpartisans. The Youth Vote. Stories are how we share our values and culture, how we have a group conversation as a community. I talk to you every day on the phones, and there are more of you out there than you know. I challenge all of you reading this to not let other people tell you what your independence means, to share your own story here. I’ll go first.

Growing up in Queens and Long Island, I did a lot of reading. There was much I didn’t like about my life and about the world, and stories provided the escapism I needed to stay sane. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure, I devoured everything I could get my hands on. The medium that made the biggest impression on me though, was comic books. Here was something exciting! Characters with incredible power taking matters into their own hands to fight injustice and corruption. This was something to aspire to. While I may have been drawn to the colorful costumes and epic battles, it was the ideas of Might in the service of Right, Great Power coming with Great Responsibility, the never ending battle, that transformed my young brain as much or more than any church sermon or boy scout lesson I sat through.

By the time I hit High School, several things happened to pull me back into the larger world. I joined JROTC, which taught discipline and how to work in a group. The second thing was that in September of my senior year two planes struck the World Trade Center. This was something out of a comic book, happening in real living color. While there might have been no one with a flashy costume to stop it, I did learn later of the extraordinary relief efforts that took place at St. Paul’s chapel adjacent to the site. If you have never been, I highly recommend visiting. It made an impression on me to see how something so good could come out of such heartbreak. I resolved to find some way to serve my country, planning to join the military. As an afterthought, I registered to vote, joining the Independence Party. Politics in my mind was a dirty business. The Democrats and Republicans fought for money, power, and influence, not truth, justice, and the American way. I didn’t think much about it though. I was just one man. I had no power, and so no responsibility.

A year and a half later, things were not looking good. I had lost an ROTC scholarship for medical reasons, had to leave school due to the cost, was depressed, and was slowly atrophying away at minimum wage. How was I going to serve my country now? Out of the blue, (or not, if you believe in providence) I received a call from the Independence Party for a survey on Politics. They patiently listened to my jaded answers, and asked at the end if I’d like to get involved. I said, “Sure. I need a job. Do you have jobs?”.

So began an eye opening time for me. I learned that while my basic assumptions about politics had been correct, reality went so much deeper than that. I learned that the Democrats and Republicans are a political duopoly, an electoral cosa nostra that has inserted itself between the people and the government. They have changed the rules to keep themselves in power, making competition from outsiders all but impossible. They force good people who want a seat at the table to be brokered through them, to pay them tribute and promise them favors. Truly these are villains fit for the Legion of Doom.

While there are villains certainly, there are also those who oppose them, those who take matters into their own hands to fight injustice and corruption. They may not be faster than a locomotive or leap tall buildings, but they have what history has shown to be the greatest power of all. The power to organize people. There is a movement building across the country to reform the rules the parties have written to keep themselves perpetually in power, to break up the duopoly the two “families” have on the political process. And it’s the organizers who are leading it, on the phones, the street corners, the blogosphere. The power of conversation, the power to organize people to work together for their common good, to dream the same dream, that is the greatest superpower, and I’ll take that any day over heat vision.

So that’s my story. While I still read Superman and Spiderman, I read Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jackie Salit now too. I think they’d get along well together. Why am I an independent? Because I’m a comic book geek, and I know who the good guys are."

So what is your independent story?

Michael H. Drucker
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NYC Voting Machine Politics

Sorry I missed this but I lost my server and I am now back with the fastest server I could build.

Federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into how the New York City's Board of Elections awarded a $50 to $70 million contract for optical voting machines.

Two sources said US Attorney Preet Bharara has served subpoenas to determine if there was anything irregular in the deal landed by Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., one of the leading companies in the industry. The subpoenas were sent "all over the place," a source said. Another source said Bharara began focusing on the voting-machine contract after indicting Anthony Mangone, a politically connected lawyer, for allegedly bribing a former Yonkers City Councilwoman to switch her vote on two development projects. Mangone, who has ties to the Queens Republican Party, was one of several lobbyists hired by ES&S. He was arrested Jan. 6 -- the day after the city's 10-member Board of Elections selected the company in a 6-1 vote over Dominion Voting of Toronto, which employed its own lobbyists. The dissenting vote was cast by Fred Umane, the Manhattan Republican commissioner. Two commissioners abstained and one was absent. Records show the competition between the two voting companies was tight.

Evaluators at the Board of Elections, grading everything from software security to poll-worker training, gave ES&S 3,417 points. Dominion received 3,395 --a difference of one-third of 1 percent.

I will watch this closer in the future, as I picked the ES&S system on its capabilities in the beginning of the selection process, as the representative of the NYC Independence Party.

Michael H. Drucker
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